I went a-lobbying today

Today I joined a group that visited Senator Amy Klobuchar's office to lobby for publicly-funded health care. We gathered at Open Book coffee house downtown, about 40 of us, ranging from children to old people, at 11:30AM and walked over to AK's office a couple of blocks away. It was heartening to hear that 18 people had made the walk at 8AM and that two more groups were scheduled to go in the afternoon.

AK herself was not there, but we stood in line and each presented a written statement to the aides in the office as well as making an oral statement.

It felt good to be presenting statements directly to a legislator as opposed to just griping on the Internet or to friends and acquaintances.

And did they give you any clues as to which way Klobuchar is going to go?

Many of us wrote on-the-spot letters to AK, and we handed them over to the aides. I think they have to be impressed by the numbers if nothing else--18 in the early morning, our group of 40 at noon, another 40 in one group in the afternoon, and an indeterminate number later in the afternoon.

Since I wrote my letter on the spur of the moment, I forgot a special plea that I could have made, making use of our shared history of being Yale students at the same time. (She got her BA at the same ceremony where I received my Ph.D.) Namely, I could have reminded her of the Yale Health Plan, where paying tuition entitled you (at that time) to a full range of health services at no extra charge: psychiatric, childbirth, abortion, emergency surgery, whatever, at the campus clinic and Yale-New Haven Hospital, which is the teaching hospital for the medical school.

During an especially stressful time in my graduate school career, I was seized with abdominal cramps so severe that I couldn't straighten up. The campus police took me to the emergency room, and after poking around and questioning me, the doctors injected a sedative and a muscle relaxant, which caused the cramps to subside. However, they kept me overnight for observation anyway and released me at about noon the next day. I never saw a bill, nor was I ever billed for diagnosis and treatment of bad knees a couple of years later. All I had to do was show a current student ID.

It was like living in Europe. :-)

It's good!
And thanks for participating and sharing!

thanks for taking the time to do that. I know the more pressure on her the better.

Thank you for doing that Lydia. Is there going to be another walk?